The Bride of the Mistletoe Part 11

His eyes were on her now as so often in girlhood when he had curbed her exuberance and guided her waywardness. He was watching as she, coa.r.s.ely wrapped and carrying some bundle of things of her own, opened her front door, left her footprints in the snow on the porch, and pa.s.sed out--wading away. Those eyes of his saw what took place the next day: the happiness of Christmas morning turned into horror; the children wild with distress and crying--the servants dumb--the inquiry at neighbors' houses--the news spreading to the town--the papers--the black ruin. And from him two restraining words issued for her ear:

"My daughter!"

Pa.s.sionately she bore the picture to her lips and her pride answered him. And so answering, it applied a torch to her blood and her blood took fire and a flame of rage spread through and swept her. She stopped her preparations: she had begun to think as well as to feel.

She unpacked her travelling bag, putting each article back into its place with exaggerated pains. Having done this, she stood in the middle of the floor, looking about her irresolute: then responding to that power of low suggestion which is one of anger's weapons, she began to devise malice. She went to a wardrobe and stooping down took from a bottom drawer--where long ago it had been stored away under everything else--a shawl that had been her grandmother's; a brindled crewel shawl,--sometimes worn by superannuated women of a former generation; a garment of hideousness. Once, when a little girl, she had loyally jerked it off her grandmother because it added to her ugliness and decrepitude.

She shook this out with mocking eyes and threw it decoratively around her shoulders. She strode to the gorgeous peony lampshade and lifting it off, gibbeted it and scattered the fragments on the floor. She turned the lamp up as high as it would safely burn so that the huge lidless eye of it would throw its full glare on him and her. She drew a rocking chair to the foot of the bed and seating herself put her forefinger up to each temple and drew out from their hiding places under the ma.s.s of her black hair two long gray locks and let these hang down haglike across her bosom. She banished the carefully nourished look of youth from her face--dropped the will to look young--and allowed the forced-back years to rush into it--into the wastage, the wreckage, which he and Nature, a.s.sisting each other so ably, had wrought in her.

She sat there half-crazed, rocking noisily; waiting for the glare of the lamp to cause him to open his eyes; and she smiled upon him in exultation of vengeance that she was to live on there in his house--_his_ house.

After a while a darker mood came over her.

With noiseless steps lest she awake him, she began to move about the room. She put out the lamp and lighted her candle and set it where it would be screened from his face; and where the shadow of the chamber was heaviest, into that shadow she retired and in it she sat--with furtive look to see whether he observed her.

A pall-like stillness deepened about the bed where he lay.

Running in her veins a wellnigh pure stream across the generations was Anglo-Saxon blood of the world's fiercest; floating in the tide of it pa.s.sions of old family life which had dyed history for all time in tragedies of false friendship, false love, and false battle; but fiercest ever about the marriage bed and the betrayal of its vow. A thousand years from this night some wronged mother of hers, sitting beside some sleeping father of hers in their forest-beleaguered castle--the moonlight streaming in upon him through the javelined cas.e.m.e.nt and putting before her the manly beauty of him--the blond hair matted thick on his forehead as his helmet had left it, his mouth reddening in his slumber under its curling gold--some mother of hers whom he had carried off from other men by might of his sword, thus sitting beside him and knowing him to be colder to her now than the moon's dead rays, might have watched those rays as they travelled away from his figure and put a gleam on his sword hanging near: a thousand years ago: some mother of hers.

It is when the best fails our human nature that the worst volunteers so often to take its place. The best and the worst--these are the sole alternatives which many a soul seems to be capable of making: hence life's spectacle of swift overthrow, of amazing collapse, ever present about us. Only the heroic among both men and women, losing the best as their first choice, fight their way through defeat to the standard of the second best and fight on there. And whatever one may think of the legend otherwise, abundant experience justifies the story that it was the Archangel who fell to the pit. The low never fall far: how can they? They already dwell on the bottom of things, and many a time they are to be seen there with vanity that they should inhabit such a privileged highland.

During the first of these hours which stretched for her into the tragic duration of a lifetime, it was a successive falling from a height of moral splendor; her nature went down through swift stages to the lowest she harbored either in the long channel of inheritance or as the stirred sediment of her own imperfections. And as is unfortunately true, this descent into moral darkness possessed the grateful illusion that it was an ascent into new light. All evil prompting became good suggestion; every injustice made its claim to be justification. She enjoyed the elation of feeling that she was dragging herself out of life's quicksands upward to some rock, where there might be loneliness for her, but where there would be cleanness.

The love which consumed her for him raged in her as hatred; and hatred is born into perfect mastery of its weapons. However young, it needs not to wait for training in order to know how to destroy.

He presented himself to her as a character at last revealed in its faithlessness and low carnal propensities. What rankled most poignantly in this spectacle of his final self-exposure was the fact that the cloven hoof should have been found on n.o.ble mountain tops--that he should have attempted to better his disguise by dwelling near regions of sublimity. Of all hypocrisy the kind most detestable to her was that which dares live within spiritual fortresses; and now his whole story of the Christmas Tree, the solemn marshalling of words about the growth of the world's spirit--about the sacrifice of the lower in ourselves to the higher--this cant now became to her the invocation and homage of the practised impostor: he had indeed carried the Christmas Tree on his shoulder into the manger. Not the Manger of Immortal Purity for mankind but the manger of his own b.e.s.t.i.a.lity.

Thus scorn and satire became her speech; she soared above him with spurning; a frenzy of poisoned joy racked her that at the moment when he had let her know that he wanted to be free--at that moment she might tell him he had won his freedom at the cheap price of his unworthiness.

And thus as she descended, she enjoyed the triumph of rising; so the devil in us never lacks argument that he is the celestial guide.

Moreover, hatred never dwells solitary; it readily finds boon companions. And at one period of the night she began to look back upon her experience with a curious sense of prior familiarity--to see it as a story already known to her at second hand. She viewed it as the first stage of one of those tragedies that later find their way into the care of family physicians, into the briefs of lawyers, into the confidence of clergymen, into the papers and divorce courts, and that receive their final flaying or canonization on the stage and in novels of the time. Sitting at a distance, she had within recent years studied in a kind of altruistic absorption how the nation's press, the nation's science of medicine, the nation's science of law, the nation's practice of religion, and the nation's imaginative literature were all at work with the same national omen--the decay of the American family and the downfall of the home.

Now this new pestilence raging in other regions of the country had incredibly reached her, she thought, on the sheltered lowlands where the older traditions of American home life still lay like foundation rock. The corruption of it had attacked him; the ruin of it awaited her; and thus to-night she took her place among those women whom the world first hears of as in hospitals and sanitariums and places of refuge and in their graves--and more sadly elsewhere; whose misfortunes interested the press and whose types attracted the novelists.

She was one of them.

They swarmed about her; one by one she recognized them: the woman who unable to bear up under her tragedy soon sinks into eternity--or walks into it; the woman who disappears from the scene and somewhere under another name or with another lot lives on--devoting herself to memory or to forgetfulness; the woman who stays on in the house, giving to the world no sign for the sake of everything else that still remains to her but living apart--on the other side of the locked door; the woman who stays on without locking the door, half-hating, half-loving--the accepted and rejected compromise; the woman who welcomes the end of the love-drama as the beginning of peace and the cessation of annoyances; the woman who begins to act her tragedy to servants and children and acquaintances--reaping sympathy for herself and sowing ruin and torture--for him; the woman who drops the care of house, ends his comforts, thus forcing the sharp reminder of her value as at least an investment toward his general well-being; the woman who endeavors to rekindle dying coals by fanning them with fresh fascinations; the woman who plays upon jealousy and touches the male instinct to keep one's own though little prized lest another acquire it and prize it more; the woman who sets a watch to discover the other woman: they swarmed about her, she identified each.

And she dismissed them. They brought her no aid; she shrank from their companionship; a strange dread moved her lest _they_ should discover _her_. One only she detached from the throng and for a while withdrew with her into a kind of dual solitude: the woman who when so rejected turns to another man--the man who is waiting somewhere near.

The man _she_ turned to, who for years had hovered near, was the country doctor, her husband's tried and closest friend, whose children were asleep upstairs with her children. During all these years _her_ secret had been--the doctor. When she had come as a bride into that neighborhood, he, her husband's senior by several years, was already well established in his practice. He had attended her at the birth of her first child; never afterwards. As time pa.s.sed, she had discovered that he loved her; she could never have him again. This had dealt his professional reputation a wound, but he understood, and he welcomed the wound.

Many a night, lying awake near her window, through which noises from the turnpike plainly reached her, all earthly happiness asleep alongside her, she could hear the doctor's buggy pa.s.sing on its way to some patient, or on its return from the town where he had patients also. Many a time she had heard it stop at the front gate: the road of his life there turned in to her. There were nights of pitch darkness and beating rain; and sometimes on these she had to know that he was out there.

Long she sat in the shadow of her room, looking towards the bed where her husband slept, but sending the dallying vision toward the doctor. He would be at the Christmas party; she would be dancing with him.

Clouds and darkness descended upon the plain of life and enveloped it. She groped her way, torn and wounded, downward along the old lost human paths.

The endless night scarcely moved on.

She was wearied out, she was exhausted. There is anger of such intensity that it scorches and shrivels away the very temptations that are its fuel; nothing can long survive the blast of that white flame, and being unfed, it dies out. Moreover, it is the destiny of a portion of mankind that they are enjoined by their very n.o.bility from winning low battles; these always go against them: the only victories for them are won when they are leading the higher forces of human nature in life's upward conflicts.

She was weary, she was exhausted; there was in her for a while neither moral light nor moral darkness. Her consciousness lay like a boundless plain on which nothing is visible. She had pa.s.sed into a great calm; and slowly there was borne across her spirit a clearness that is like the radiance of the storm-winged sky.

And now in this calm, in this clearness, two small white figures appeared--her children. Hitherto the energies of her mind had grappled with the problem of her future; now memories began--memories that decide more perhaps than anything else for us. And memories began with her children.

She arose without making any noise, took her candle, and screening it with the palm of her hand, started upstairs.

There were two ways by either of which she could go; a narrow rear stairway leading from the parlor straight to their bedrooms, and the broad stairway in the front hall. From the old maternal night-habit she started to take the shorter way but thought of the parlor and drew back. This room had become too truly the Judgment Seat of the Years. She shrank from it as one who has been arraigned may shrink from a tribunal where sentence has been p.r.o.nounced which changes the rest of life. Its flowers, its fruits, its toys, its ribbons, but deepened the derision and the bitterness. And the evergreen there in the middle of the room--it became to her as that tree of the knowledge of good and evil which at Creation's morning had driven Woman from Paradise.

She chose the other way and started toward the main hall of the house, but paused in the doorway and looked back at the bed; what if he should awake in the dark, alone, with no knowledge of where she was?

Would he call out to her--with what voice? Would he come to seek her--with what emotions? (The tide of memories was setting in now--the drift back to the old mooring.)

Hunt for her! How those words fell like iron strokes on the ear of remembrance. They registered the beginning of the whole trouble. Up to the last two years his first act upon reaching home had been to seek her. It had even been her playfulness at times to slip from room to room for the delight of proving how persistently he would prolong his search. But one day some two years before this, when she had entered his study about the usual hour of his return, bringing flowers for his writing desk, she saw him sitting there, hat on, driving gloves on, making some notes. The sight had struck the flowers from her hands; she swiftly gathered them up, and going to her room, shut herself in; she knew it was the beginning of the end.

The Shadow which lurks in every bridal lamp had become the Spectre of the bedchamber.

When they met later that day, he was not even aware of what he had done or failed to do, the change in him was so natural to himself.

Everything else had followed: the old look dying out of the eyes; the old touch abandoning the hands; less time for her in the house, more for work; constraint beginning between them, the awkwardness of reserve; she seeing Nature's movement yet refusing to believe it; then at last resolving to know to the uttermost and choosing her bridal night as the hour of the ordeal.

If he awoke, would he come to seek her--with what feelings?

She went on upstairs, holding the candle to one side with her right hand and supporting herself by the banisters with her left. There was a turn in the stairway at the second floor, and here the candle rays fell on the face of the tall clock in the hallway. She sat down on a step, putting the candle beside her; and there she remained, her elbows on her knees, her face resting on her palms; and into the abyss of the night dropped the tranquil strokes. More memories!

She was by nature not only alive to all life but alive to surrounding lifeless things. Much alone in the house, she had sent her happiness overflowing its dumb environs--humanizing these--drawing them toward her by a gracious responsive symbolism--extending speech over realms which nature has not yet awakened to it or which she may have struck into speechlessness long aeons past.

She had symbolized the clock; it was the wooden G.o.d of Hours; she had often feigned that it might be propitiated; and opening the door of it she would pin inside the walls little cl.u.s.ters of blossoms as votive offerings: if it would only move faster and bring him home! The usual hour of his return from college was three in the afternoon. She had symbolized that hour; one stroke for him, one for her, one for the children--the three in one--the trinity of the household.

She sat there on the step with the candle burning beside her.

The clock struck three! The sound went through the house: down to him, up to the children, into her. It was like a cry of a night watch: all is well!

It was the first sound that had reached her from any source during this agony, and now it did not come from humanity, but from outside humanity; from Time itself which brings us together and holds us together as long as possible and then separates us and goes on its way--indifferent whether we are together or apart; Time which welds the sands into the rock and then wears the rock away to its separate sands and sends the level tide softly over them.

Once for him, once for her, once for the children! She took up the candle and went upstairs to them.

For a while she stood beside the bed in one room where the two little girls were asleep clasping each other, cheek against cheek; and in another room at the bedside of the two little boys, their backs turned on one another and each with a hand doubled into a promising fist outside the cover. In a few years how differently the four would be divided and paired; each boy a young husband, each girl a young wife; and out of the lives of the two of them who were hers she would then drop into some second place. If to-night she were realizing what befalls a wife when she becomes the Incident to her husband, she would then realize what befalls a woman when the mother becomes the Incident to her children: Woman, twice the Incident in Nature's impartial economy! Her son would playfully confide it to his bride that she must bear with his mother's whims and ways. Her daughter would caution her husband that he must overlook peculiarities and weaknesses. The very study of perfection which she herself had kindled and fanned in them as the illumination of their lives they would now turn upon her as a searchlight of her failings.

He downstairs would never do that! She could not conceive of his discussing her with any human being. Even though he should some day desert her, he would never discuss her.

She had lived so secure in the sense of him thus standing with her against the world, that it was the sheer withdrawal of his strength from her to-night that had dealt her the cruelest blow. But now she began to ask herself whether his protection _had_ failed her.

Could he have recognized the situation without rendering it worse? Had he put his arms around her, might she not have--struck at him? Had he laid a finger-weight of sympathy on her, would it not have left a scar for life? Any words of his, would they not have rung in her ears unceasingly? To pa.s.s it over was as though it had never been--was not _that_ his protection?

She suddenly felt a desire to go down into the parlor. She kissed her child in each room and she returned and kissed the doctor's children--with memory of their mother; and then she descended by the rear stairway.

She set her candle on the table, where earlier in the night she had placed the lamp--near the ma.n.u.script--and she sat down and looked at that remorsefully: she had ignored it when he placed it there.